I've naturally been through a multitude of Historical Jesus books. (That's the kind of Jesus we've been given, after all: a man half-concealed by the gospels that claim to reveal him, and otherwise rather disdainfully undocumented.) Many of these books have been wonderful, deeply illuminating... and yet they, like the gospels themselves, have no satisfactory answer to that basic question: "What on Earth was he doing here?!"

I have an equal difficulty with "Christians"-- as in "people whose sense of divinity leads to them considering Jesus to be God", not just a man who introduced us (and passed along some great wisdom in the process.)

That is, I'm fine with the people themselves, and with them calling God "Jesus", much as some lay Buddhists I've met simply called God "Buddha." But I can't do it, myself, and wouldn't want to! There's God-- who I vaguely know (After all, he's been around all my life, even in the background when I used to be an atheist.) And there's also this man Jesus who many times spoke for God, some time ago; he was willing to die to get his message(s) out... and then he did die, and though the message was often warped between his spoken words and our reading, it shines through pretty clearly here and there... and part of that message was: "Don't just go around calling me 'Lord'! Pay attention to what I'm telling you here!"

What was he telling us? More than I can say here, obviously! But if you go back to Mark, probably the oldest and most (often) historical of the gospels, his basic proclamation is: "The time has come; the Kingdom of God is upon you! Repent, and believe the Gospel!"

Hey! This was 2000 years ago! And what is this "Gospel"? (It wasn't "Jesus died for your sins!" Jesus was right there saying it!) This gospel, like the "gospel" of any contemporary Emperor, was "Rejoice, you've got a new ruler, you lucky people!" Jesus, in other words, was saying that the reign of God had begun!

God rules; was that news? God was ruling the world before Adam, and he hasn't gone away. But God seems to delegate a lot... The teacher in my "Old Testament" class thought of God as having in a sense subdivided Himself in the process of peopling the world-- a perspective you can find hinted at in scriptures from Judaism to Hinduism etc. There's God as an eternal, transcendent being-- and then there's that little spark that constitutes each human life-- and these are the same! But to have God ruling from the bottom up, so to speak, introduces much apparent disorder, as each baby Godlet starts screaming for its divine power while it's still struggling in mortal diapers.

So how can "The Kingdom of God" differ from "This World"?

The World, to the best of my observation and historical reading, always provides us with an Intolerable Wrong.

There may well be more than one Intolerable Wrong available, and these days they're lined up to take their turns appalling us. They don't go away (not for a very long time) and nothing we do budges them an inch. They must exist for the sake of human beings, but we don't readily see them as helping, and would just as soon do without that sort of help. Life, in the World as we've generally come to know it, is intrinsically flawed.

The Kingdom of God is somehow beyond that. And yet Jesus, who announced that this Kingdom was real and present with him, ended up suffering his very own Intolerable Wrong. And if his Wrong has somehow put This World right, subsequent history simply doesn't make that clear. What, then, was he talking about?

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Unable to answer my own question, I have had to leave this post languishing in the drafts for a long time, while I played Civilization and read more books and generally vegged...

Wow! Eventually I began rereading Thomas Wright's The New Testament and the People of God. It is thick going, and worth (nearly) every ponder!

What he is basically saying therein about our writings about Jesus... is that the stories came first! It is not so much that the gospels give us 'records of the life of Jesus' (as some pious readers would have it), although one can't rule entirely out the possibility that some traces of personal remembrances might remain-- but that what people remembered, and told each other, and wrote, were perfectly Jewish stories showing the significance of various incidents...

These wouldn't be "just the facts," then-- or deliberate fictions-- but "just what (people felt) the facts were about."

And what we see there, most explicitly (if you look for it) is a man talking about the nation of Israel in his time... And a continued insistence that this man is fulfilling the (Hebrew) Scriptures. Now that notion could give someone whiplash-bewilderment! The better one knows the Scriptures, the more so!

This man comes along badmouthing not only the Authorities but the most deliberately pious Jews of his time; he claims implicitly (and eventually explicitly) to be the Messiah, the true King of Israel, and then the goyim hang him up on a cross and he dies. This fulfills the promises to Abraham? This is the eternal kingdom of David? Hey, the Romans went on patrolling the fort overlooking the Temple and appointing Chief Priests and splitting whatever goods could be sweated out of the country with their Hellenistically-minded native elites, grinding the poor into destitution and starvation... until the whole place blew up, a few decades later, in futile and devastating rebellion. Twice. So a pig was sacrificed to Jupiter on the Temple altar, and eventually the ruins of Jerusalem were rebuilt as a pagan city forbidden to Jews! This fulfills the Scriptures? Because (you say) the man was resurrected, and told you to go preach to the goyim instead-- and when they believed, they started having pogroms?

This wasn't the sort of Messiah people were expecting? But that's all right, it was divine bait-and-switch so it's all right... Hmmm!!! My initial reaction was emphatic, revulsive, no-way!

The notion looks, on the surface, virulently anti-Jewish!-- and if ever a people suffered the undue afflictions of Job, well, when hasn't one ethnic group after another suffered such affliction and then been blamed for it, so why not the Jews? But I utterly loved the time I spent in a Jewish Renewal synagogue, and the people I met there, and the Godly inspiration I've found in many Jewish authors! Judaism has led many people to deep knowledge, love, and intimacy with God, among them the very Jesus who tends to bewilder my fellow goyim almost as much as he once offended some of their predecessors!

This is a people whose name says that they struggle with God! They've been doing that for us, for a very long time, and doing it as well as the best of us. And often falling short, like everyone else.

One of their stories says, that Moses told them, quite explicitly: If they fell short, the promised blessings would turn to curses. We goyim have been falling short; don't we see curses looming over us?

The message was, as I see it: "Here is your king, if you will have him! This is what the reign of God looks like!"

And like our leaders would have done, their leaders rejected it. And most of their people, like most of us, followed the reasonable, respectable leadership the so-called 'real world' has to offer. And that 'real world' gave him its worst, but could not, in the end, harm him.

Anybody want a king? Worth what you'll give for him! Asking nothing, not laying a finger on us, but warning that we will reap what we sow, that only what we base on love, respect, and trust of God will endure...